


The Witch and her House

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: Winternight Series - Katherine Arden
Genre: 1300s, F/M, Gen, Night On Fic Mountain 2019, Night on Fic Mountain Pinch Hit, Russia, Slavic mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 07:24:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19204651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: "Have I ever told you the tale," Morozko said, "Of the frost-demon, the Winter King? Long, long ago, before ever there were Rus, with their long swords and their iron axes, there was still winter. Winter was-""Is," said Vasya, and curled closer. Solovey nosed an apple nearer the oven, ears cocked."Is, then," said Morozko, "A death-god, puissant and stern, merciful to his subjects, indifferently true to his nature. Beloved, so that every midwinter the maidens would walk willingly to the forest, hoping for his embrace.""Handsome, I'm sure," said Vasya."You know me too well," said Morozko.





	The Witch and her House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dolorosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolorosa/gifts).



It was always winter in the house of the Winter King, always winter and never spring, but in the new house, the witches' house, at the bow-curve of the lake beyond midnight, spring came swift and sharp as an arrow. The ice on the lake cracked with a boom that thundered through the woods, the trees flung off coats of snow and stood tall and green, and cradled in their roots the snowdrops thrust through the melting frost, flushed the palest of pinks. Vasya, rejoicing, cast off the deep dark of winter, swept out the floors and turned the bedding, and then bade the Domoviye of her own house farewell. It was spring. Every living being stirred and leaned into the new year, and the whole world waited on the turn of Solovey's hooves. 

That year, Vasya turned east, to the border. The sword-hand of the Mongol Emperor rested lightly on these lands, and she and Solovey travelled down the great river of the Amur undisturbed, dancing with the white tigers of the mountains under the light of the full moon, and playing with the queens of the river, the silver sturgeon, in the sparkling shallows. They ate arctic char and rainbow-scaled trout, spring greens and wild garlic and the fresh free herbs of the river bank, and every so often they travelled with a bear with shoulders broad enough to carry the weight of the world, and at other times with a slight young man with black curls and a sardonic smile, who was not young at all. When the river broadened, they sailed on a raft made of logs each as wide as two horses put together, traded for purses of fish-skin and shoes of silk, and galloped through forest older than the oldest woman in the world. And then, as the coming summer warmed the rock under their feet and lightened their evenings, the river grew heavy with silt, and Solovey scented the air and found it sharp with salt. Tides washed at the edges of their camp, and eels flashed their pale bellies between the bare roots of the silver-leaved trees of the estuary. 

A day later, they saw the sea. 

"What did you expect?" asked Morozko, amused. His white mare snorted, looking sideways, neck arched, hooves planted firmly in the sand of the tide line.

Solovey, eyes wide and every muscle tuned as tight as a bowstring, balked at the gentle waves as he had not done at fire, or Midnight, or the bells and icons of the church. His ribs heaved with every puffed breath. 

"It's so big," said Vasya. Her hands were tangled in Solovey's mane, and her knees close to his comforting warmth.

"It is more than half the world," agreed Morozko. The wind from the sea played with his dark hair, and tangled the white mare's mane into ringlets, as free in the breeze as the white foam on the ocean. Morozko dismounted, barefoot, and watched the rippling waves greet his toes. "It is not winter yet," he told them. The sea hesitated, drawing back, and then curled around his ankles, bringing him a strand of dark green seaweed and half of a razor shell, and then a pebble of iridescent glass, worn as smooth as a whetstone. Gravely, Morozko bent, accepting. He gave the mare the seaweed, and tucked the razor shell into the scabbard with his short knife, and tossed Vasya the pebble. It glittered, curving across the sand, and when she caught it in the palm of her hand it was a pendent, wrapped in silver and pearls and hung on a chain long enough to circle her neck three times over. "Greetings to you, too, my lord," Morozko said, and from the breast of his jacket he drew a jeweled brooch that he had not been wearing last night, nor the night before. The brooch was as large as a fist, encrusted with rounded emeralds and set with diamonds that glittered as brightly as the sunlight on the waves. When Morozko gave it to the sea, it did not splash, nor even skitter over the surface like a thrown pebble, but floated, bobbing away from them on the tide. 

"Medved claims to have taken bread and salt with the Tsar of the Sea," Morozko says. "He says they feasted in a hall made of coral and bones, on fish with teeth and animals with fins, while musicians with the tails of lion-fish played for them on harps strung with wind."

Where the sea met the sky, the horizon was rounding, as if a hill rose under the waves.

"But in winter, the Sea-Tsar's halls echo with ice, and I see only empty castles and bare fortresses," said Morozko, whose own lands were the lands of frost and snow, and who slept through his brother's kingdom of summer.

The brooch glinted, sliding up the slope of the mountain, which was not a mountain, but the smooth shoulder of a man as large as a mountain, rising from the ocean. His skin was green, shading from the palest jade to the deepest depths of a Tsavorite emerald. His hair and beard streamed with seaweed: his eyes were deep-set and dark, and he bore a diadem of bones and mother-of-pearl. In one hand he carried a trident, and in the other, Morozko's brooch, which should have looked as small as a pea but instead seemed perfectly proportioned. For a moment, the Tsar of all the Seas was perfectly still, staring at the brooch, and then he flung up his trident in greeting and acceptance, so that the spindrift flew wide in diamond droplets, and sunk beneath the waves so swiftly the sea heaved and spun in a whirlpool the size of a city. A pair of dolphins arched above the waves, bright in sunlight, and then dived after their master.

Morozko sighed. "Kin you may be, but I would not attempt to bind Morskoi," he said, cautious and careful as he would be with no other witch. Yet, when he turned around Vasya and Solovey were looking at the whirlpool as wide-eyed as children, which they certainly were not. As if they had never fought the Golden Horde and won, as if they had never made space in all of Russia for the dual faith of the Chyerti and the Church, as if they had never bound the Winter King and loosened his brother - or was it the other way around? - nor freed the Firebird, as if they did not know how to tread the roads of Midnight.

One saw the ocean for the first time only once. Slowly, for it was nearly summer and his magic waned, Morozko conjured a pavilion on the shoreline, lit a fire and filled a cauldron with crab and limpets and good white fish, and watched the stallion Solovey discover that the sea was salty and his beloved, proud Vasya the feeling of sand between her toes.

Summer came. Solovey and Vasya turned south, and travelled through the mountains and across the desert. They ran with antelopes and trekked with camels, ate honey that came fresh from the hive and drank the brackish water of desert wells, parched as the winds that crossed the sands. They traded with nomads and swapped stories with hermits and scholars, and sometimes they travelled alone and sometimes, in the high mountains and among the karsts, they travelled with a bear who was also a man. As they went south, they found villages of craftsmen and networks of scholars, artists who painted scrolls with inks as liquid as water and men and women who could make paper as thin as onion skin or as warm as good woolen cloth. They found poets and musicians and philosophers; they sipped rice-wine and wrote haiku, watching the full moon rise over the river, and in the steep-roofed temples admired paintings of dragonflies and lotus flowers. 

Then the first leaves fell from the asters, red as a rubies, and Solovey turned his head towards home. Autumn came, warm and rich with riverside berries and root stews, contrary with winds and shot with sudden downpours, so that Vasya wrapped herself in her fur cloak and plaited Solovey's tail against tangles. The bear shared fresh salmon and blackberries, and sometimes when they camped there was a fire already lit and a rabbit stew and fresh bread and curds. Later, when the bear left them, there was a tent, and as the wind grew colder, rugs and blankets as soft and light as snow, until one morning when they woke to frost dappling the earth under the trees and Morozko sipping tea by the fire. It was very nearly winter and they were very nearly home, although Morozko and Vasya pulled the blankets over their heads for almost a full day, so that Solovey had to forage for his own supper and the fire was embers by the time they emerged, flushed and ruffled. There were baked tubers with fresh butter and the last of the autumn mint, and handfuls of wild mushrooms: there was porridge for Solovey, and sweet, wrinkled apples, and blackberry jam, and a silver samovar with rich black tea.

The Winter King and the witch moved in circling rituals, bound anew, bending to each other with the grace of young birch trees. Their touches lingered: their eyes flirted, as if they were still unsure of each other, although there was joy and sorrow in their dance.

"Olga will be in Moscow," Vasya said. 

Morozko sighed, setting down his glass, and the white mare flicked her tail with fierce irritation. "I have no great love for the city," he said. The wind gusted in the pines of the riverbank, the first breath of storms to come. 

"I know," said Vasya. "I'm not asking you to travel with us. But Olga is my sister. And there is Marya, too. I gave my word that I would take her home with me, when she was old enough."

For a moment, there was a flash of defiance in her face, the stubborn, angry pride that had carried the ugly little girl-child Vasilisa Petrovna from her father's hearth to the gates of the Winter King. But the Vasya of now had taken the Vasya of then and built towers and domes on those foundations, and set flags and pennants flying from each one. The woman who rode a horse who had once been a bird, who wore Chinese silks and the sea-Tsar's pearls, who held the Winter King and the Summer King chained in the palm of her hand, who had lost a brother and gained a lover, who had become something more than human - that woman's word was her own alone. Vasya was as sure and as stern as any iconic, gilded martyr. 

"Home to the dark," muttered Morozko. But he was newly risen into the young cold of the winter, and tender with love, so that there was no edge to his words.

"Come to us for midwinter," said Vasya. "Come anytime - you are always welcome. But at midwinter I promise I shall show you midnight as you have never seen her."

Frost, glittering, wove silver lace over the earth of the river bank and the edges of the blankets. Solovey shivered, and shook snowflakes from the long sweep of his mane, but Vasya laughed. The campfire glowed, warm as oven-roasted chestnuts, as if the fire had forgotten hunger, and the wind turned from the ice and brought the scent of spices instead. 

"Snow will come soon enough," Morozko said.

"I will sacrifice as many gingerbread maidens as you might possibly desire," said Vasya, rich with a summer's travelling and the thought of her own house and the domovoi who cared for it. "There will be porridge, and more roast ham than you can eat." 

Morozko glanced up from the fire. For a moment, his face was all angles and shadows, the slant of his eyebrows and the peak of his nose, the hollow of his cheeks and the carved curve of his lips and the glint of his teeth, longer and sharper than any human's. He was the Winter-King, and his appetites were immense, inhuman, insatiable. 

"Dunya used to make midwinter biscuits for us when we were children," said Vasya. "Cows and goats, and a chicken with legs like tree trunks. She would stamp them out of the dough with a carved mold, like a butter-mold, smaller than the palm of my hand."

"Vasya," said Morozko, who could make a palace from a handful of snow.

Solovey's head was up, his eyes dark and interested. He huffed.

"I have seen you carving toys, Morozko," said Vasya, and smiled at them, her lover the demon and her horse the nightingale, both beloved.

Autumn flung itself willy-nilly into the fall of the year, whipping the leaves from the trees and tumbling the rivers end-over-end among the rocks. It was the season of rain, the season of mud, the rasputitsa, so that if he must travel Solovey's hooves seldom touched the road. He stepped gingerly, hunched against the bells and the fires of the city, and Vasya's fingers curled so tightly in his mane blood sprang in the palms of her hands. In the most terrible of betrayals, Moscow had nearly killed Vasya. It had killed Solovey. They stayed only long enough to tell Vasya's sister Olga, confined in the women's quarters of the terem, the short tales of their travels, and to retrieve Vasya's mare Zima, so that Marya would have her own horse. They were just in time, for with all Olga's care Marya, who had tasted freedom and been promised release, was pale and worn within the stones of the terem. Solovey carried her out of the city, plodding and stiff as any merchant's draft horse, with Zima dragging at her lead rein. It was only when the forest had closed around them, and the night drawn down the stars, that Solovey's head came up. He shook out his mane, and his stride lengthened. Rocked by that gentle rhythm, Marya fell asleep in the curve of Vasya's arms, her face sweetly young. 

When midnight arrived, Vasya and Solovey slid into it as smoothly as a knife through curds, and went home. 

Winter came. Winter came in a skirl of snowflakes and an exquisite patterning of frost in candlelight, and brought Morozko and the white mare over and over again, so that snow lay deep along the lake shore and guarded Vasya's house, so that the samovar was never cold and the oil lamps never burned dry. The house's Chyerti, the household spirits, hustled to bring hay and dried plums, brushes and blankets, and peats to bank up the fire. In any other house, the lines between the Chyerti were strictly drawn, but here in the witches' house, at the back of midnight, all the old rules blurred. The household Domovoi swept and cleaned and tidied, polished the tiles of the oven and wiped down the tables, and did not bristle and spit at the Dvorovoi, the yard-spirit, coming in from the cobbled outbuildings to curl up by the chimney and listen to the night's stories. With horses to tend, the Vazila brought his measures of hay and oats into the house itself, and when it was time for the telling of tales, he perched on Solovey's back, weaving brushes from wisps of straw. The bathhouse spirit, the Bannik, dragged his bundle of birch branches into the corner, and sat cross-legged on the rug as he peeled each switch. And by the hearth, the witches' Domovaya made marzipan animals and pressed fruit pastilles, smoked trout and drained curds for cheese, dried mushrooms and roasted hazelnuts and boiled fruit cakes. Golden witch-lights swung above their heads, pots steamed on the oven shelf, and every spirit called to the house, forest, hearth, or heath, found a welcoming door. 

At the table, Vasya cleaned and re-worked Solovey's harness, taught herself to read and then to study, told stories and listened to them. At midnight, the Vodyanoy of the harsh northern steppe, dour and damp, shared bread with a trio of kindly Vila, and brought himself to mention first a particularly comfortable riverbank, and then the darkest, coolest of shaded pools, while the Vila told him of their laughing mountain streams. At midnight, the Leshy of the forest rooted itself on stools and benches, curling its roots into the earthen floor, and observed truce with the black-clad Polevik of the fields, laying aside the axe and finding common ground in soil. Winter winds gusted against the chimney and flung Morozko's snow against the shuttered windows, but inside a young Vikhor knotted his breezes into his hair and listened enthralled to a turbaned Zduhac tell tales of mayhem and madness among the scarlet roof-tiles and carved, curled gables of houses on the roof of the world, helping himself to sugared angel-wing cookies and flakes of salted fish. 

The astrolabe spun. The Domovaya took one last taste of the grain porridge, and laid down her ladle, satisfied. Morozko looked up from his carving, head on one side, and Vasya caught his eyes. Outside, the wind howled: the house itself swayed, shifting from foundation to foundation, but inside, it was warm and bright. Tonight, there was music, the cheerful, swinging dances of the villages, and strange spirits dancing between the horses, maidens in white and gold, young men in unfamiliar clothes. There were Leshiye in the rafters and Vila posed on the oven in snow-white robes, their golden hair threaded with ribbons. On this night, there were more horses than Morozko's white mare and her son Solovey in the house tonight, a herd of them, dark gentle eyes fading into the dusk, a flutter of wings in the rafters, a glimmer of gold that might have been feathers, or a tail. There was a man the size of an oak, and a grove of pale, thin women veiled in silver gowns, and a grandmother by the stove with bony legs and blackened teeth, sharing honey-comb cakes with a stout, cheerful girl who was very nearly human.

The astrolabe spun, and Morozko, smiling, laid aside his knife. He was very fine tonight in the full flush of his power, illuminated and golden and as sure of himself as any demon-king on his own celebration day, even one found far from his own lands, in a house whose witch had bound him with promises he had not intended to make. 

"Well, Vasilisa Petrovna," he said. "Even at midnight, the year turns. You offered me gingerbread."

"I did," said Vasya, and held out her hands. For midwinter, her sarafan was the deep red of crushed bilberries, and her dark hair lay like silk, loose over her shoulders . "I have not forgotten your due," she said.

The Vila were drawing back, smiling, and the music was slower. The beaten earth of the floor invited them to dance - 

The door crashed open. Uncouth and ungainly as a troll, cackling, the bear Medved shouted, "Brother!" The fur of his shoulders was heaped with snow, and all the claws of his bare feet were black with frost. His teeth were sharp and yellow, and frost rimed his scarred blind eye. "Brother, the world turns upside down, and I am a free monster. Will you invite me in?"

"It is winter," said Morozko, quietly, although the ice wind thundered through the trees and screamed across the chimney. "Brother."

Medved laughed. "Look at us, so polite," he mocked. "Meet me at midsummer, brother, and see how long your ice lasts then. Meet me now, while the year turns. Step outside with me." There was an axe in his hands, long-handled and double-headed, massive as the key-stone of the Kremlin tower. 

In Morozko's hands there were swords of flaming ice. He kicked the table back. The Bannik leapt for the rafters, and clung there, shivering. 

"Stop," said Vasya. Solovey was at her back, dangerously still.

The house froze. Morozko's swords melted in his hands, and were gone. Medved's axe turned in his hands, the wood of it stretching and growing, springing into leaf. The stone head vanished in a puff of dust.

"Sit down," said Vasya. "Medved, come in. Sit. Eat. I invited you both."

There was porridge on the table, and biscuits shaped as if for children. Morozko sat, glaring. Medved walked like a man in chains, although his hand was steady when he reached for the spoon.

"What, have you never seen a bear sup, before?" he said. 

"Will you sing for it, too?" said Morozko. His hands were clasped on the table, as relaxed as if he sat at the Tsar's high table. 

"She chained you as fast as me, winter-king," said Medved, grinning. "The leash may be sweeter, but it hobbles you just the same. Eat your porridge, brother, like a tame demon should."

"Medved," said Vasya.

"Drag a sleeping bear from his den at the height of winter, and what do you expect?" said Medved. "I'll dance to your tune, witch-girl, but don't expect me to laugh while I do it."

"This is my feast, not yours," said Morozko. "Go back to your hole in the ground, and may your bones molder there until spring."

"I could bring your own snow down to cover all of midnight-"

"Enough!" said the Babushka by the oven. " _Enough_!" Her voice was dark, and ageless, as if she bound the night and stars themselves to her words. She had set her bowl down, and where she had laid it cracks spun through the oven tiles, sharp as knives, swift as a breaking dam, and as she stood the Vila flinched back into a single birch tree, leafless and quivering, and the Domovoy hurled himself into the oven. Her shadow was the size of the palace at Sarai, the size of the forest itself, with claws and teeth. "You are guests here," said the Babushka, and her voice was steel and iron and black obsidian, old, old. 

Medved was a man again, small, barrel-chested, with a cheerful furred face and laughter-lines at his eyes. "Yes, Grandmother," he said, and picked up his spoon. As he ate, the table spun itself a white table-cloth and set the samovar steaming, laid out plates of dried fruit and roasted nuts and gingerbread maidens.

Morozko bowed his head. "Grandmother," he said, and ate. 

As he ate, the Babushka dwindled back onto her bench by the fire, and one of the Vila peered around the trunk of the birch tree. The white mare snorted, and Solovey flicked his tail, so that the witch-lights swung and scattered among the rafters. The Vikhor essayed a run of notes on his pipes, and then the faintest of tunes, until the Zduhac produced his tabor, and then the Domovoy and the Domovaya of the house were dancing on the table-cloth. All the plates and bowls of the feast stirred with them, and then one by one the whole of the Chyerti, drawn into the midwinter dance, heel-to-toe, spinning like autumn leaves, like dervishes, like the wild hairy Cossacks of the hills, and the horses, hooves thudding on the earth, and the house itself, swinging to the rhythm of the drums, and in the middle of them all the witch and her lover and his brother, as light as fireflies. 

The year turns, the longest night passes. In the house by the lake, beyond midnight, the new year dawns.


End file.
